Despite the environmental disaster wrought by the World Bank's Akosombo Dam
in Ghana (used for below cost power to process bauxite mined in Jamaica) and its
failure to live up to power generating expectations, international aid donors
are preparing to finance the building of another massive dam on the Black Volta
River by a consortium led by a subsidiary of U.S. Vice President Richard "Dick"
Cheney's scandal-plagued company, Halliburton. The dam would flood much of
Bui National Park, eliminating an important remaining area of savanna
woodland in northern Ghana and the Park's hippo population. Daniel Bennett, a
British biologist, has led field expeditions to Bui National Park, studying
hippos and other wildlife. He returned to Ghana in March 2001 for final studies
on the hippos before their feeding habitat would be flooded, in the hope of
devising a plan to assist the animals once displaced. However, Ghanaian
officials were not happy to have someone knowledgeable about natural history
around to refute their lies (i.e., that the hippos could be trapped and
relocated), so when Bennett arrived in Ghana to continue his field work, he was
denied permission to enter the Park.

The Bui Dam is an even greater environmental disaster than drilling in the
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, yet the international environmental groups have
failed to take any action against it. Here is what I have been able to find on
the web:

"There are also other more controversial projects afoot. The
Volta River Authority signed a memorandum of understanding this month with a
construction consortium led by British company Brown and Root [subsidiary or
division of Halliburton Company (US)], for a second 400MW hydro-electric dam
at Bui, up the Black Volta river from Akosombo.

"Officially, the project's cost is estimated at $450m. But diplomats and
donors [who are they?] believe the true price will be higher. They are
also concerned about the chosen location, in a national park, the possibility of
floods spilling over borders to the Ivory Coast, and the practicalities of a
hydro-electric dam on a river that is said to be highly seasonal."

Who is paying for the dam and related bribes to the Ghanaian ruling elite?
That question is unanswered by the web pages I have found, but it undoubtedly is
the taxpayers of the United States and Europe (involuntarily), through
international development banks, United Nations agencies and international aid
entities. This is really just another corporate welfare scam, with the US and
European funds laundered through international agencies on their way to
Halliburton and its junior partners.

Bennett returned to Ghana to continue his research in March 2001, but he was
banned by the Ghana Wildlife Division from even entering the Park as a tourist
because he has discovered that the traditional feeding areas of the Park's
population of hippos will be destroyed during the early flooding stages of the
dam. Bennett reports that local conservation organizations have remained
entirely silent thus far.

"In recent years, serious reductions in rainfall have resulted in water
shortages and power crises in Ghana. [The obvious consequence of
felling nearly all the forests - also financed by US and European taxpayers
through the World Bank et al.] The Ghanaian government aims to reduce the
country's dependence on hydropower through the installation of 400 MW of
replacement power from both diesel and gas turbine generators.

* * *

"The government is negotiating with a consortium led by Brown and Root from
Britain on a $660-million, hydroelectric project located at Bui on the Black
Volta. The Bui project would have a generation capacity of 400 MW [presumably
under theoretically ideal rainfall conditions]. In addition to increasing
the domestic electricity supply, power generated from Bui could be exported to
Burkina Faso, Mali and Côte d'Ivoire."

"VALCO is a joint aluminum smelting operation formed between Kaiser and
Reynolds Metals, powered by the Akosombo dam on the Volta River in Ghana.
Financed by the World Bank, which took the lead in the project in the
1950s and 1960s. VALCO receives energy below-cost. VALCO uses Jamaican
bauxite smelted in Louisiana. The area inundated by the dam covers five
percent of the country, and displaced 80,000 people (one percent of the
population of Ghana) when the reservoir was filled in the 1960s. Seventy
thousand of the 100,000 people who have contracted onchocerciasis (river
blindness) have been blinded; 80,000 people have been permanently disabled by
the parasite schistosomiasis (Hancock, pp. 140-141; and Earth Island Institute's
International Dams Newsletter, v.2, n.1, 1987).

Ghana's Corruption Perception Index is 3.5 -- not bad for West Africa -- a tie
with Argentina, Bulgaria, Senegal and the Slovak Republic. The world range in
1999 was between 1.2 (most corrupt = Nigeria) and 10 (least corrupt = Finland).
Transparency
International. (Corporations, banks and aid donors that facilitate
third-world corruption, like a prostitute's johns, avoid any stigma.)

Ghana has an annual population growth rate of 2.87% and an average of 5.7 births
per woman -- a typical African overpopulation crisis.
Overpopulation.org. Rather than building more dams and in the process
destroying what little remains of wild habitats in Ghana, international donors
should be directing all their resources at halting population growth, regardless
of the views of
the
religious fundamentalists who currently control the U.S. government and the
dogmatic Marxists found in many international NGOs.

"Number of internal reviews conducted by World Bank to analyze actual
performance of its large dams: 0"

Ghana's must famous politician, Kofi Annan, the U.N.'s affirmative action
secretary-general, is, not surprisingly, stupid and corrupt. Like a typical
African dictator, he exploded viciously at James Bone, the Times of London
reporter who asked him an embarrassing question, still unanswered, about a
missing Mercedes jeep that Annan's son imported into Ghana using his father's
name and diplomatic discount and tax exemption. The question about the missing
car is part of the wider probe into Annan's role in the U.N.'s Oil for Food
scandal, which Annan and his flunkies have worked diligently to cover up. See
"Kofi Annan takes on The Times." Timesonline, 23 December 2005; "An
'Overgrown Schoolboy' Asks: Where is the Car?" by James Bone. Wall Street
Journal, December 27, 2005. "Abdoulie Janneh, the U.N. official who arranged
the tax exemption in Ghana was recently promoted to U.N.
under-secretary-general, in charge of the Economic Commission for Africa."

I think it is important to publicize facts and to name names. The individuals in
international aid agencies and banks who support and approve destructive
projects should be identified and memorialized forever on the Internet. Now they
largely escape any blame for their actions. One notable exception was Robert
Skillings, the World Bank official who pushed through the disastrous
Polonoroeste loan that led to the deforestation of much of Rondônia, Brazil in
the 1980s, over the objections of the bank's environmental and anthropological
specialists. Skillings was outed by Adrian Cowell in
The Decade of
Destruction: The crusade to save the Amazon rain forest. (1990). The
World Bank (now the Wolfowitz Bank) banned their expert on Amazonian ecology
from Rondônia for four years in retaliation for submitting a truthful report
accurately predicting the dire consequences of the loan.

WorldTwitch welcomes submissions from whistleblowers and naturally will
protect the confidentiality of sources.